Here's another twenty-sixth century render with the same ship as last time. About the wings on spaceships: Yes, they're good for atmospheric flight - for refueling at gas giants or landing in water, if not land - but more importantly they're good for the surface area they provide to radiate heat. See, the nasty sci-fi secret is to get the stated performance (half a gee at 200,000 isp or better) for a ship weighing thousands of tons, you need terawatts of power. And even if the power plant that puts out that energy is 99.9% efficient, you've still got to dump gigawatts of waste heat. So it helps to have big fins. For this image I made my New York harbor and environs terrain by print-screening a hybrid image from Google Maps, gray scaling it in PSP, then importing it as a picture image for a Bryce terrain - set to planetary resolution. Then I pounded the hell out of it in the terrain editor, and duplicated and mutilated it three more times to get a little variety in the texture and terrain. The arcologies are Bryce booleans, the background cityscape are a few (alt-)posterized terrains, and the Statue of Liberty is a freebie .3ds object that's been sitting ignored in my props directory for at least six years. Thanks for viewing and commenting. --- Getting up the ladders to the top deck in a full Earth gravity was a struggle, but the view was memorable enough to be worth a few aches. It was an hour past dawn on a windless autumn day. I guess I had expected the legendary New York City to be vibrant, like Lowell or the Planum cities back home. But instead of a busy harbor and sky scene, we looked out over the Hoboken and Manhattan arcologies, glaring at each other across the river, locked in a decades-long cold war. Decrepit HeDe fusion plants spewed steam into the air. Rusted debris lined the shore. The radiation counters blipped in warning, and that was the only sound I remembered except the gentle lapping of waves against the hull. Now Earth might still be home to the bulk of humanity, and New York's strongholds, new towns and shanties might still house millions of people, but I finally understood what the skipper meant when he said that the future of the race was out among the planets and stars, not here in our soiled nest. -Ensign LeBelle Shurga, Martian Imperial Navy 31 October 2516, Coronation Goodwill Tour